Habits

A good night’s sleep

Lack of sleep could well be sabotaging your efforts to lose body fat. Check out this Sleep guide to see why. And if eating a dozen sausages before bedtime doesn’t help (see video above : ), then try implementing a pre-sleep routine and aim to get 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep every night:

– Make sure your bedroom is comfortable, cool, and as dark as possible.

– Don’t use your bedroom for working.

– Avoid large meals, caffeine and alcohol close to bedtime.

– Practice relaxation techniques like deep breathing or meditation.

– Try herbal teas e.g. camomile.

Kicking bad habits

It’s coming up to the 10th anniversary of when I decided to give up smoking and try to recuperate my previous good health and active lifestyle. I was going to wait until August to publish this but as I have several clients who are currently considering giving up the evil weed, I wanted to share this now.

After several years of complete inactivity and smoking a packet a day I decided I was going to give up for good and that the best way to do it would be to attempt a one mile run and be motivated by my suffering. It worked. Although if I’m honest, I had spent the previous couple of months gradually preparing my subconscious for the change ahead by reading up about what my habit was doing to me, making me less able to carry on deceiving myself about it not really being that bad.

It also helped that at the time, I was living in an apartment block in Barcelona whose bathrooms and bedrooms all had windows which opened onto the interior core of the building. This meant that every morning I was woken up by my chain-smoking neighbours performing their morning ritual of hacking up all the phlegm in their lungs.

Christmas drinking

It’s that time of year again when people begin consuming significantly more alcohol than they do during the rest of the year, especially if you’re British. So, how will this affect all the progress you’ve been making with the exercise and nutrition program you’ve been following in the months leading up to Christmas?

First of all, it’s good to be aware of the amount of calories alcohol contains: 7 calories per gram (compared with 4 per gram of carbohydrate or protein, and 9 per gram of fat). This is why although a lite beer may only contain 2.5 grams of carbs, it still packs 100 calories due to the alcohol content.

What can be worse than the alcohol itself is the stuff you mix it with – sugary sodas that can mean one drink contains 300+ calories. More than a few of these in one session can mean you’re getting close to your daily calorie quota in drinks alone.

And as anyone who has experienced post-drinking munchies already knows, it’s not just the calories from the drinks that you need to worry about. “You have to remember that alcohol lowers your blood sugar, making you hungry,” says Sian Porter, consultant dietician and spokesperson for the British Dietetic Association. “The more you drink the more your desire to eat may increase, and the less likely you are to eat sensibly.”

5 minutes a day to double the weight you lose

Keeping a food diary can double a person’s weight loss. This is what one of the largest and longest weight loss trials ever conducted found in 2008.

Jack Hollis Ph.D., the lead author of the study at Kaiser Permanente’s Center for Health Research in Portland, USA said “The more food records people kept, the more weight they lost. Those who kept daily food records lost twice as much weight as those who kept no records. It seems that the simple act of writing down what you eat encourages people to consume fewer calories.”

Participants followed a diet rich in fruits and vegetables and exercised at moderate intensity levels for at least 30 minutes a day. After six months, the average weight loss among the nearly 1,700 participants was approximately 13 pounds.

“It’s the process of reflecting on what you eat that helps us become aware of our habits, and hopefully change our behavior,” says Keith Bachman, MD, a doctor at the same research center. “Every day I hear patients say they can’t lose weight. This study shows that most people can lose weight if they have the right tools and support. And food journaling in conjunction with a weight management program is the ideal combination of tools and support.”

Emotional Eating

If everyone ate food solely for the purpose of covering their energy needs, then nobody would be overweight. The problem is that most people don’t eat food just for fuel, they eat it for any number of emotional reasons: it’s the focus of a social gathering, it’s part of a ritual such as watching TV, it’s associated with love or caring or it just (temporarily) makes them feel better.

If you eat mindlessly and impulsively, without thinking about why you’re eating, then there’s a very real danger of putting on unwanted, excess weight. According to Dr. Brian Wansink, author of Mindless Eating, you make about 200 decisions about food every day, ranging from what to have for breakfast, to whether to eat every time you pass a tray of sweets at work. If you make these decisions emotionally, then the impact this has on your weight and health over time can be massive.

How to tell the difference between physical and emotional hunger

1. Physical hunger builds up gradually with a rumble in the stomach, usually about 3 hours after the last meal or snack. Emotional hunger can happen suddenly at any time.
2. With physical hunger, you can wait if you have to. Emotional hunger seems to demand immediate satisfaction.
3. Physical hunger is usually a general desire for food. Emotional hunger is usually a desire for a specific food.
4. After eating for physical hunger, you get a sense of satisfaction. After eating for emotional reasons you feel guilty.

Strategy to stop emotional eating

1. Become aware of your eating behaviours (don’t eat mindlessly, or as an automatic response to stress).
2. Watch out for your emotional triggers (stress, loneliness, boredom, frustration, etc.) and prepare defences for them, e.g. get rid of all unhealthy snacks from your office, and bring in healthy alternatives.
3. Ask yourself why you’re eating something and how you will feel after you’ve eaten it.
4. Develop alternate coping mechanisms e.g. social support, meditation / yoga to help deal with stress, relaxing music and bath, go for a walk, remove yourself from the source of the stress, take a powernap instead of loading up on sugar when tired.
5. Establish new beliefs about food and the right reasons for eating, e.g. Food is fuel.

Gluttonous Male Mice Give Diabetes to Daughters

Text from www.wired.com

A prospective dad’s diet may affect the health of his future children, suggests a study of cross-generational nutritional impacts in mice.

Males were fed a high-fat diet, becoming obese and diabetic, then mated with lean, healthy females. At six weeks of age, or the mouse equivalent of puberty, their daughters became glucose-intolerant, a major step toward diabetes.More